The beginnings of enjoyment

It's not easy to understand Poetry.  And it is for this reason that I am swaying from my normal format.

Today I want to talk about poetry.  I want to TALK about it or at least the beginning of my enjoyment of this magical thing.  Poetry, my friends, is like the beating of your heart or breathing.  It is rhythmic and consistent but also allows for intensified speed  or the pulling and pushing of tempo.  It is essential to life because it gives us a window into ourselves from outside ourselves.  It is food.  A nourishment that is unattainable at a grocery store.

Of course all of this jabber is just my idealism peaking out.  Sorry.  I won't let that happen again.

Let me get back to the start.

I grew up knee deep in literature.  As the child of a writer (my mom) and an emotionally charged former Marine, I spent much of my childhood dinners discussing the ramifications of Hamlet's numerous soliloquies or the poetic pros of Pat Conroy or the complex beauty of Donne.  

My eldest brother Eric told my mom the day he was ready to read and hasn't stop. Literally.  He reads everything.  Every billboard.  Every marking on a package. He now is an extraordinary poet in his own right and an English teacher at a local prep school.  

My second brother Joe has memorized every single word he has ever read or written.  I remember playing a game that consisted of Joe reciting a line and the rest of the family having to guess what novel he had extracted it from.  He practiced his poetry only a short time but constructed some lovely pieces about his now wife, Andrea.

Having grown up around giants you would have thought that it would have put me a step ahead on the map but my little brother and I struggled to read and to enjoy it.  I myself could hardly sound a word until sixth grade.  I felt stunted and was.  I felt behind though I was constantly engaged in  the interpretation and appreciation of literature each night at the dinner table.  

I was emotional.  I wanted to connect with the emotions of people around me.  I wanted to know I wasn't alone.  But I was also a free spirit and the idea of sitting around reading a book for hours hardly interested me at all especially considering the difficulty with which I knew I had to approach the written word.  

One day, I remember more clearly than most in my life.  I entered my mother's sewing room, where she often wild away hours creating and dreaming.  I, as if everything was normal,  sat down on the cold wood floor to watch my mother make her latest project.  I remember hitting the floor and instantly sobbing.  

"I'm stupid", I said.  "I don't understand anything."  My mother turned to me and said, "You are not stupid.  Here let me prove it to you."

So she pulled out a tattered copy of a paperback book.  I didn't like the cover...so I couldn't like what was inside either and I highly doubted that it would prove me to be not stupid let alone intelligent.  

We read each line together and untangled the tortured lines as a team.  And after each one she asked me, "What does this mean?", and I would answer.  Before I knew it, we had finished the poem and all my misgivings about my intellect had melted away with the sounding of the buttery poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

It was here that my love of poetry and I suppose all creative beauty was born.  You could say that the seeds for this love had been planted long before my recognition of it but I don't believe that matters.  

I am thankful for my mom having walked me through my agony and pointing me toward beauty.  I am thankful for my father who spent every evening with me reading aloud and weeping over the deep astounding loveliness of George MacDonald.  And I am thankful for this poem, which began my long love affair with - you guessed it - poetry.

God's Grandeur 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.